Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference

Audre Lorde’s article “Age, race, class, and sex: Women Redefining Difference” reaches me at a personal level because issues she has faced or gives example of problems I have had to face in the past and is still going through. When I attended Liberty University, the largest and christian school in the world, it was like being put in a bubble displaced from the rest of the world in its thinking. The majority of the school was white, republican, christian, heterosexual, males (or the females that believed men were above them) and before attending Liberty most came from private christian schools or were home-schooled. The questions I was asked while attending their really opened my eyes to how I am really seen as person. As an African American I was asked during introductions “what sport do you play here?” because I had to have a sports scholarship to attend here and not a full ride because I was the Salutatorian at my high school. I had to explain that just because you have friends of a different race and they gave you permission, that doesn’t mean you can say racist slurs and not be seen as a racist. As I was sitting down for lunch I could always tell when a group of people were about to ask me a question so they could walk away more “street smart” or “culturally educated” as they would stand afar in group pointing and staring at me pushing their friends my way. I would always leave the dining hall with humiliation thinking of how this is what circus freaks must feel like. Lorde says in her work “In other words, it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes. I am responsible for educating teachers who dismiss my children’s culture in school. Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity.”

Audre Lorde goes on to talk about the difficulty of being a Black woman and a feminist because white feminism doesn’t acknowledge our problems and the black community thinks we are traitors to them as they thing we are anti-black. When I am in the Black community and say that I am a feminist, they tend to think that I do not care what happens to the Black people and I am wrong for that. It never occurs to them that I, a African American female, can care about police brutality, mass incarceration, stereotyping, because I also care about rape, equal pay, and reproductive health rights. As for the struggles of being a Black feminist, I can say that today we have a sect of feminism that was brought about by Audre Lorde and many other feminists of color who were tired of taking the back burner to “white feminism” and that is Intersectionality feminism. The definition of intersectionality feminism was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw as “The view that women experience oppression in varying configurations and in varying degrees of intensity. Cultural patterns of oppression are not only interrelated, but are bound together and influenced by the intersectional systems of society. Examples of this include race, gender, class, ability, and ethnicity.”